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Washington blog: The wet and dry economies
Dan Atkinson at the G7 in Washington...
Another five-day circus is over, and the 'moving map' on the seat-back video screen puts your British Airways airliner somewhere over Newfoundland, heading home.
The world is safe for another six months - or, at the very least, the institutions charged with guarding the world's economy have completed another hectic round of back-slapping, drinks parties and statement-making.
Twice a year, usually in Washington, once in the Spring and once in the Autumn, finance ministers and central bankers gather for a marathon sprint of economic diplomacy, with a key challenge for them (and we in the press) being to keep track of whether they are meeting at any one time as the Group of Seven rich industrial nations, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.
They sprinted again over the past few days.
Broadly speaking, Friday is the G7, Saturday is the IMF and Sunday is the World Bank. But it is obviously not quite that simple.
For Sunday newspapers journalists, by contrast, one day is starkly different from all the others, in the most pleasant way imaginable.
Sunday, of course.
While our daily colleagues, who took Saturday off, return to the grindstone, working for their Monday editions, we can take in the special atmosphere of Sunday in Washington, a day for visiting bookshops, reading heavy newspapers and literary reviews and arranging a civilised lunch, all in the sunshine of late Spring or early Autumn.
It is all vaguely reminiscent of an older Washington, in which bookishness mixes in a high-minded way with good food and drink, a Washington of Georgetown hostesses and martinis in the N Street drawing rooms of Senator's town houses, during which one is always running into men with floppy bow ties who all used to work for the late President Kennedy, to whom they refer as 'dear Jack'.
As I was imagining a day of such balmy elegance on Sunday, imagine my reaction to the weather warning on the radio, relating to heavy rainfall throughout DC, northern Virginia and suburban Maryland.
And indeed, the rain pounded down for most of the day, the sort of rain that treats a standard telescopic umbrella with utter contempt and manages to soak the bearer.
Back home, my wife kindly told me, the sun shone out of a blue sky.Which hardly struck me as fair, given that Washington is roughly parallel with the middle bit of Turkey whereas London is roughly parallel with the east coast of Canada.
An interesting way of looking at the world, when you come to think about it, and capable of indefinite extension to all major cities. Perhaps, I thought, as the aeroplane touched down at Heathrow, it is rather more imaginative than the IMF's division into emerging markets, developing countries and so on.
Rainy or non-rainy? Wet or dry?
The economic map may never look the same again.
- Dan Atkinson, Economics Editor, Mail on Sunday
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